3/29/2016

In Brief: Oh, David Brooks, You Are So Pathetic

The Rude Pundit doesn't know what is sadder: New York Times conservascribbler David Brooks's obsession with Donald Trump or his own obsession with Brooks's obsession. Either way, in today's "column" (if by "column," you mean, "a lengthy sigh exhaled from the depths of a shit-filled pit of despair"), Brooks reaches a kind of sublime nadir of self-parody, the moment when elitist privilege meets the inescapable results of having to interact with a world that couldn't give two fucks about that privilege.

Oh, but that's not early in the column, when he explains the roles of the sexes in the 21st century, most specifically the "man." That word is in quotation marks because Brooks describes some kind of fantasy male that exists only in the fervid imaginations of people who would take the time to imagine such a bullshit creature: "[T]he ideal man, at least in polite society, gracefully achieves a series of balances. He is steady and strong, but also verbal and vulnerable. He is emotionally open and willing to cry, but also restrained and resilient. He is physical, and also intellectual." And he knows how to go down on his partner with vigor, but also respect, yet without any hint that he would like his dick sucked in return. He will go without as a right gentleman would. What this all adds up to is that David Brooks has never had a blow job.

But Brooks hits that lowest of lows when he brings in Trump as a way of defining a certain type of misogyny. Trump's brand of it is not "traditional misogyny [which] blames women for the lustful, licentious and powerful urges that men sometimes feel in their presence." Oh, no, no, no, that Victorian-era he-man woman-haters club is not what's happening now, Brooks, ever at the cutting edge, asserts. Trump sees women as a contested space for beating other men, citing Franklin Foer's essential article on the subject. He "represents the spread of something brutal. He takes economic anxiety and turns it into sexual hostility." Motherfucker, since when hasn't misogyny been about beating other men at banging women? It's a key component of misogyny: the objectification of women in order to fuck them and treat them like shit and then brag about it. The fact that this is "new" to Brooks is hilarious and depressing.

Then Brooks says, ruefully, "I’ve grappled with determining how much to blame Trump’s supporters for his rise." And that's the end of the game because Brooks has not yet grappled with how much he and his priggish ideological bedfellows have created Trump. Brooks is above such self-recrimination because that would require more than just broad generalizations, penny arcade psychology, and water treading into oblivion.